true fire and fervour of lofty and unshaken faith, always with the great raptures of a spiritual nature, the high ardours of an impassioned soul.  As we read her best poems we feel that, though Apollo’s shrine be empty and the bronze tripod overthrown, and the vale of Delphi desolate, still the Pythia is not dead.  In our own age she has sung for us, and this land gave her new birth.  Indeed, Mrs. Browning is the wisest of the Sibyls, wiser even than that mighty figure whom Michael Angelo has painted on the roof of the Sistine Chapel at Rome, poring over the scroll of mystery, and trying to decipher the secrets of Fate; for she realised that, while knowledge is power, suffering is part of knowledge.

To her influence, almost as much as to the higher education of women, I would be inclined to attribute the really remarkable awakening of woman’s song that characterises the latter half of our century in England.  No country has ever had so many poetesses at once.  Indeed, when one remembers that the Greeks had only nine muses, one is sometimes apt to fancy that we have too many.  And yet the work done by women in the sphere of poetry is really of a very high standard of excellence.  In England we have always been prone to underrate the value of tradition in literature.  In our eagerness to find a new voice and a fresh mode of music, we have forgotten how beautiful Echo may be.  We look first for individuality and personality, and these are, indeed, the chief characteristics of the masterpieces of our literature, either in prose or verse; but deliberate culture and a study of the best models, if united to an artistic temperament and a nature susceptible of exquisite impressions, may produce much that is admirable, much that is worthy of praise.  It would be quite impossible to give a complete catalogue of all the women who since Mrs. Browning’s day have tried lute and lyre.  Mrs. Pfeiffer, Mrs. Hamilton King, Mrs. Augusta Webster, Graham Tomson, Miss Mary Robinson, Jean Ingelow, Miss May Kendall, Miss Nesbit, Miss May Probyn, Mrs. Craik, Mrs. Meynell, Miss Chapman, and many others have done really good work in poetry, either in the grave Dorian mode of thoughtful and intellectual verse, or in the light and graceful forms of old French song, or in the romantic manner of antique ballad, or in that ’moment’s monument,’ as Rossetti called it, the intense and concentrated sonnet.  Occasionally one is tempted to wish that the quick, artistic faculty that women undoubtedly possess developed itself somewhat more in prose and somewhat less in verse.  Poetry is for our highest moods, when we wish to be with the gods, and in our poetry nothing but the very best should satisfy us; but prose is for our daily bread, and the lack of good prose is one of the chief blots on our culture.  French prose, even in the hands of the most ordinary writers, is always readable, but English prose is detestable.  We have a few, a very few, masters, such as they are.  We have